This poem is a homage to the work of Rafael Alberti’s friend, the famous painter and fellow Spaniard Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). Alberti met the artist in 1933; in the following decades, they collaborated on various projects and remained close until… Read More ›
This work, first published in The Fisherman’s Invocation (1978) but written much earlier, is the best-known and the most anthologized of Gabriel Okara’s poems. It is also representative of his poetry because it engages the conflict of cultures, a major… Read More ›
Beliefs expressed in Personal Creed shaped Claribel Alegría’s writings after the 1959 triumph of the Cuban revolution and forced her admitted “awakening” to the world around her. A second major jolt was the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, just… Read More ›
One of du Bouchet’s most challenging palimpsests of synesthetic theory and praxis, his book-length poem Peinture (1983) at once discusses and inhabits creative processes of unwriting and unpainting. Examining fluid thresholds between “painting,” disappearance, and the open, the text performs… Read More ›
Over the Roofs of the World (2005) is Jamaican poet Olive Senior’s third collection of poetry. In her second collection, Gardening in the Tropics, a cycle of poems is connected by themes of cultivation and a repeated opening line. In… Read More ›
In her study Keepers of the Motherland: German Texts by Jewish Women Writers, Dagmar C. G. Lorenz comments that Nelly Sachs wrote In den Wohnungen des Todes (In the Dwellings of Death), the collection of which O the Chimneys is… Read More ›
On the Waves of the Wireless (1925) can be called Jaroslav Seifert’s first mature collection of poetry, although he was only 24 when it was published and although, as he recollects in his memoir All the Beauties of the World,… Read More ›
“On the Threshold” (“In Limine”) was originally published in Eugenio Montale’s first volume of verse, Cuttlefish Bones (Ossi di seppia, 1925). It is a short poem in four stanzas: the first and third stanzas have five lines each; the second… Read More ›
“On the State of the Union” is indicative of how Aimé Césaire’s vision of négritude had evolved from the concerns of being a Martinican struggling for racial equality with white Europeans into a universal view of civil rights for Blacks…. Read More ›
At the same time that Zionism was crystallizing as a political movement, Hayim Bialik’s poetic output was coming into the limelight. Many of his readers believe that Bialik reached his artistic apex with his Poems of Wrath series, a shockingly… Read More ›
This poem, Nur eine Rose als Stütze, appeared in 1959 in a revised version as the title poem of Hilde Domin’s first collection. The poem consists of four stanzas of five lines each. The first two stanzas speak of the… Read More ›
First published in The Graveyard Also Has Teeth, “On Being a Poet in Sierra Leone” is an example of Syl Cheney-Coker’s self-referential—one might almost say egocentric—style. This 34-line free-verse poem—which contains minimal punctuation (only two exclamation points and six commas)—is… Read More ›
“On a Red Steed” (Na krasnom kone) first appeared in Tsvetaeva’s Remeslo (Craft) in 1923. In this poem, the female speaker traces the development of a woman poet, explores her source of inspiration, and identifies the sacrifices she has to… Read More ›
Omeros is Derek Walcott’s longest and most ambitious poem, evoking the tradition of epic poetry through its stylistic features. The title is a variation on the modern Greek pronunciation of “Homer.” Various characters have Homeric names: Helen, Achille, and Hector…. Read More ›
Like many of Joseph Brodsky’s poems, Odysseus to Telemachus examines the corruptive effects of empire on the individual. In Torso (1977), the subject is the Roman Empire, described as “the end of things,” a place where a person finds the… Read More ›
A speaker praises his loved one, yet finds he is unable to satisfy her: this is not an unfamiliar trope in Neruda’s work. But in Ode with a Lament, from the second volume of Neruda’s somber Residencia en la Tierra… Read More ›
The central poem of the Poet in New York (Poeta en Nueva York) cycle, “Ode to Walt Whitman” is one of Federico García Lorca’s lyric landmarks in which the poet uses avant-garde form (including free verse and surrealist imagery) to… Read More ›
Andrei Voznesensky first published Ode to Gossips in his second collection of verse, Parabola, published in Moscow (1960); he then slightly altered the poem when he republished it in Antimiry (Antiworlds, 1964). Stanley Moss’s excellent translation preserves the work’s eclectic… Read More ›
Composed as a prose poem and narrated from an omniscient point of view, this piece by Sakutarō gives an account of the sad life of an octopus neglected for a long time in “a certain aquarium” (281). The poet delicately… Read More ›
The poem—divided into stanzas of varying length and written in unrhymed free verse—begins with the refrain, repeated throughout, “At the end of the wee hours . . . ,” as the speaker wakes from a troubled sleep to survey the… Read More ›